VOCABULARY DESCRIPTION, ACQUISITION AND PEDAGOGY

Part I Vocabulary and description1.1 Vocabulary size, text coverage and word lists Paul Nation Victoria University of Wellington Robert Waring Notre Dame Seishin University How much voca

Vocabulary: Description, Acquisition and Pedagogy

Edited by

Norbert Schmitt and

Michael McCarthy

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# Cambridge University Press 1997

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First published 1997

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Acknowledgements page ix

Part 1 Vocabulary and description 6 1.1 Vocabulary size, text coverage and word lists 6

PA U L N AT I O N A N D R O B E R T WA R I N G

1.2 Written and spoken vocabulary 20

M I C H A E L M C C A R T H Y A N D R O N A L D C A R T E R

1.3 Vocabulary connections: multi-word items in English 40

R O S A M U N D M O O N

1.4 On the role of context in ®rst- and second-language 64 vocabulary learning

W I L L I A M N A G Y

1.5 Receptive vs productive aspects of vocabulary 84

F R A N C I N E M E L K A

1.6 Editors' comments ± description section 103 Part 2 Vocabulary and acquisition 109 2.1 Towards a new approach to modelling vocabulary 109 acquisition

PA U L M E A R A

2.2 Vocabulary acquisition: word structure, collocation, 122 word-class, and meaning

N I C K C E L L I S

2.3 What's in a word that makes it hard or easy: some 140 intralexical factors that affect the learning of words

B AT I A L A U F E R

2.4 The in¯uence of the mother tongue on second language 156 vocabulary acquisition and use

M I C H A E L S WA N

2.5 Learning the orthographical form of L2 vocabulary ± 181

a receptive and a productive process

A N N RYA N

2.6 Vocabulary learning strategies 199

N O R B E R T S C H M I T T

2.7 Editors' comments ± acquisition section 228 Part 3 The pedagogical context 237 3.1 Current trends in teaching second language vocabulary 237

A N I TA J S O È K M E N

3.2 Incorporating vocabulary into the syllabus 258

F E L I C I T Y O ' D E L L

3.3 Vocabulary reference works in foreign language learning 279

P H I L S C H O L F I E L D

3.4 Vocabulary and testing 303

J O H N R E A D

3.5 Editors' comments ± pedagogy section 321

Contents

Part I Vocabulary and description

1.1 Vocabulary size, text coverage

and word lists

Paul Nation

Victoria University of Wellington

Robert Waring

Notre Dame Seishin University

How much vocabulary does a second

language learner need?

There are three ways of answering this question One way is to ask

`How many words are there in the target language?' Another way is to ask `How many words do native speakers know?' A third way is to ask

`How many words are needed to do the things that a language user needs to do?' We will look at answers to each of these questions

This discussion looks only at vocabulary and it should not be assumed that if a learner has suf®cient vocabulary then all else is easy Vocabulary knowledge is only one component of language skills such as reading and speaking It should also not be assumed that substantial vocabulary knowledge is always a prerequisite to the performance of language skills Vocabulary knowledge enables language use, language use enables the increase of vocabulary knowledge, knowledge of the world enables the increase of vocabulary knowledge and language use and so on (Nation, 1993a) With these cautions in mind let us now look

at estimates of vocabulary size and their signi®cance for second language learners Such information will, we believe, help us to outline clear, sensible goals for vocabulary learning

How many words are there in English?

The most straightforward way to answer this question is to look at the number of words in the largest dictionary This usually upsets dictionary makers who work with words on a daily basis They see the vocabulary

of the language as a continually changing entity with new words and new uses of old words being added and old words falling into disuse They also see the problems in deciding if walk as a noun is the same

word as walk as a verb, if compound items like goose grass are counted

as separate words, and if names like Vegemite, Agnes and Nottingham are to be counted as words These are all real problems, but they are able to be dealt with systematically in a reliable way

Two separate studies (Dupuy, 1974; Goulden, Nation and Read, 1990) have looked at the vocabulary of Webster's Third International Dictionary (1963), the largest non-historical dictionary of English when

it was published When compound words, archaic words, abbreviations, proper names, alternative spellings and dialect forms are excluded, and when words are classi®ed into word families consisting of a base word, in¯ected forms, and transparent derivations, Webster's Third has a vocabulary of around 54,000 word families This is a learning goal far beyond the reaches of second language learners and, as we shall see, most native speakers

How many words do native speakers know?

For over 100 years there have been published reports of systematic attempts to measure the vocabulary size of native speakers of English There have been various motivations for such studies, but behind most

of them lies the idea that vocabulary size is a re¯ection of how educated, intelligent or well read a person is A large vocabulary size is seen as being something valuable Unfortunately the measurement of vocabu-lary size has been bedevilled by serious methodological problems largely centring around the questions of `What should be counted as a word?',

`How can we draw a sample of words from a dictionary to make a vocabulary test?', and `How do we test to see if a word is known or not?' Failure to deal adequately with these questions has resulted in several studies of vocabulary size which give very diverse and mis-leading results For a discussion of these issues see Nation (1993b), Lorge and Chall (1963) and Thorndike (1924)

Teachers of English as a second language may be interested in measures of native speakers' vocabulary size because these can provide some indication of the size of the learning task facing second language learners, particularly those who need to study and work alongside native speakers in English-medium schools and universities or work-places At present the best conservative rule of thumb that we have is that up to a vocabulary size of around 20,000 word families, we should expect that native speakers will add roughly 1,000 word families a year

to their vocabulary size That means that a ®ve year old beginning school will have a vocabulary of around 4,000 to 5,000 word families

A university graduate will have a vocabulary of around 20,000 word

Vocabulary size, text coverage and word lists

families (Goulden, Nation and Read, 1990) These ®gures are very rough and there is likely to be very large variation between individuals These ®gures exclude proper names, compound words, abbreviations and foreign words A word family is taken to include a base word, its in¯ected forms and a small number of reasonably regular derived forms (Bauer and Nation, 1993) Some researchers suggest vocabulary sizes larger than these (see Nagy, 1.4), but in the well-conducted studies (for example, D'Anna, Zechmeister and Hall, 1991), the differences are mainly the result of which items are included in the count and how a word family is de®ned

A small study of the vocabulary growth of non-native speakers in an English-medium primary school (Jamieson, 1976) suggests that, in such

a situation, non-native speakers' vocabulary grows at the same rate as native speakers' but that the initial gap that existed between the two groups is not closed For adult learners of English as a foreign language, the gap between their vocabulary size and that of native speakers is usually very large, with many adult foreign learners of English having a vocabulary size of much less than 5,000 word families in spite of having studied English for several years Large numbers of second language learners do achieve vocabulary sizes similar to those of educated native speakers, but they are not the norm

There is some encouraging news however A study by Milton and Meara (1995) using the Eurocentres' Vocabulary Size Test (Meara and Jones, 1988, 1990; see also Read, 3.4) shows that signi®cant vocabulary growth can occur if this learning is done in the second language environment In their study of a study abroad programme of 53 European students of advanced pro®ciency, the average growth in vocabulary per person approached a rate of 2,500 words per year over the six months of the programme This rate of growth is similar to the larger estimates of ®rst language growth in adolescence Although the goal of native speaker vocabulary size is a possible goal, it is a very ambitious one for most learners of English as a foreign language

How many words are needed to do the things a language user needs to do?

Although a language makes use of a large number of words, not all of these words are equally useful One measure of usefulness is word frequency, that is, how often the word occurs in normal use of the language From the point of view of frequency, the word the is a very useful word in English It occurs so frequently that about 7 per cent of the words on a page of written English and the same proportion of the words Vocabulary and description

in a conversation are repetitions of the word the Look back over this paragraph and you will ®nd an occurrence of the in almost every line The good news for second language learners and second language teachers is that a small number of the words of English occur very frequently and if a learner knows these words, that learner will know a very large proportion of the running words in a written or spoken text Most of these words are content words and knowing enough of them allows a good degree of comprehension of a text Here are some ®gures showing what proportion of a text is covered by certain numbers of high frequency words

Table 1 Vocabulary size and text coverage in the Brown corpus

Vocabulary size Text coverage

(taken from Francis and Kucera, 1982)

The ®gures in Table 1 refer to written texts and are from Francis and Kucera (1982) which is a very diverse corpus of over 1,000,000 running words made up of 500 texts of around 2,000 running words long As

we shall see, the more diverse the texts in a corpus are, the greater the number of different words, and the high frequency words cover slightly less of the text, so these ®gures are a conservative estimate The ®gures

in the last line of the table are from Kucera (1982) The Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary (1987) claims that 15,000 words cover 95 per cent of the running words of their corpus The

®gures in Table 1 are for lemmas and not word families (A lemma is a base word and its in¯ected forms.) Word families would give fraction-ally higher coverage Table 1 assumes that high frequency words are known before lower frequency words and shows that knowing about 2,000 word families gives near to 80 per cent coverage of written text The same number of words gives greater coverage of informal spoken text ± around 96 per cent (Schonell, Meddleton and Shaw, 1956) (McCarthy and Carter discuss other differences between spoken and written discourse in the next chapter.)

With a vocabulary size of 2,000 words, a learner knows 80 per cent

Vocabulary size, text coverage and word lists

of the words in a text which means that one word in every ®ve (approximately two words in every line) are unknown Research by Liu

Na and Nation (1985) has shown that this ratio of unknown to known words is not suf®cient to allow reasonably successful guessing of the meaning of the unknown words At least 95 per cent coverage is needed for that Research by Laufer (1988a) suggests that 95 per cent coverage

is suf®cient to allow reasonable comprehension of a text A larger vocabulary size is clearly better Table 2 is based on research by Hirsh and Nation (1992) about novels written for teenage or younger readers The Hirsh and Nation (1992) study looked at such novels because they might provide the most favourable conditions for second language learners to read unsimpli®ed texts These conditions could come about because they are aimed at a non-adult audience and thus there may be a tendency for the writer to use simpler vocabulary, and because a continuous novel on one topic by one writer provides opportunity for the repetition of vocabulary Table 2 shows that under favourable conditions, a vocabulary size of 2,000 to 3,000 words provides a very good basis for language use

Table 2 Vocabulary size and coverage in novels for teenagers

Vocabulary size % coverage Density of unknown words 2,000 words 90 1 in every 10

2,000+ proper nouns 93.7 1 in every 16

2,600 words 96 1 in every 25

5,000 words 98.5 1 in every 67

The signi®cance of this information is that although there are well over 54,000 word families in English, and although educated adult native speakers know around 20,000 of these word families, a much smaller number of words, say between 3±5,000 word families is needed to provide a basis for comprehension It is possible to make use of a smaller number, around 2±3,000 for productive use in speaking and writing Hazenburg and Hulstijn (1996), however, suggest a ®gure nearer to 10,000 for Dutch as a second language

Sutarsyah, Nation and Kennedy (1994) found that a single long economics text was made up of 5,438 word families and a corpus of similar length made up of diverse short academic texts contained 12,744 word families Within narrowly focused areas of interest, such

as in an economics text, a much smaller vocabulary is needed than if the reader wishes to read a wide range of texts on a variety of different topics

Vocabulary and description

How much vocabulary and how should it be learned?

We are now ready to answer the question `How much vocabulary does

a second language learner need?' Clearly the learner needs to know the 3,000 or so high frequency words of the language These are an immediate high priority and there is little sense in focusing on other vocabulary until these are well learned Nation (1990) argues that after these high frequency words are learned, the next focus for the teacher is

on helping the learners develop strategies to comprehend and learn the low frequency words of the language Because of the very poor coverage that low frequency words give, it is not worth spending class time on actually teaching these words It is more ef®cient to spend class time on the strategies of (1) guessing from context, (2) using word parts and mnemonic techniques to remember words, and (3) using vocabulary cards to remember foreign language±®rst language word pairs Detailed descriptions of these strategies can be found in Nation (1990) Notice that although the teacher's focus is on helping learners gain control of important strategies, the end goal of these strategies is to help the learners to continue to learn new words and increase their vocabulary size

A way to manage the learning of huge amounts of vocabulary is through indirect or incidental learning An example of this is learning new words (or deepening the knowledge of already known words) in context through extensive listening and reading Learning from context

is so important that some studies suggest that ®rst language learners learn most of their vocabulary in this way (Sternberg, 1987) Extensive reading is a good way to enhance word knowledge and get a lot of exposure to the most frequent and useful words At the earlier and intermediate levels of language learning, simpli®ed reading books can

be of great bene®t Other sources of incidental learning include problem-solving group work activities (Joe, Nation and Newton, 1996) and formal classroom activities where vocabulary is not the main focus The problem for beginning learners and readers is getting to the threshold where they can start to learn from context Simply put, if one does not know enough of the words on a page and have comprehension

of what is being read, one cannot easily learn from context Liu Na and Nation (1985) have shown that we need a vocabulary of about 3,000 words which provides coverage of at least 95 per cent of a text before

we can ef®ciently learn from context with unsimpli®ed text This is a large amount of start-up vocabulary for a learner, and this just to comprehend general texts So how can we get learners to learn large amounts of vocabulary in a short space of time?

The suggestion that learners should learn vocabulary directly from

Vocabulary size, text coverage and word lists